They own huge tracts of land in virtually every country in South America.In the United States drugs money has probably been used to buy five huge apartment blocks in Washington, and in New York a residential area of 250 acres situated at Oyster Bay. An apt description for a system based on Nasa’s computer network. No one makes a phone call, sends a fax, uses a computer, in many a Latin American city, without “sharing” the line with the fat one.The fat one is linked to its brothers in Medellin, Cali, Bogota, Caracas, Lima and La Paz. It has immediate access to every scrap of information contained on police and Intelligence computers in Colombia and Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia: the criminal records, identification data, status of all criminal investigations.A string of hotels, major business centres and industrial companies in Italy. Or the technical know-how to create and operate “El Gordo”.El Gordo, “the fat one”, is the pet name for a computer regarded by its creator as “out of this world”. If the annual supply of cocaine were to be packed in 1.5kg bags – the size of a regular bag of flour – the amount supplied to the United States each year would, if stood on top of each other, be four times as high as Mount Everest. If the amount supplied to the entire world were similarly stacked it would be 13 times as high as Everest.The world that this power grouping at the top of the illegal narcotics pyramid inhabits is a world where money by the ton is available for whatever is needed.

The product, whether cocaine, opium, heroin, marijuana or the range of chemical drugs such as amphetamine, PCP, LSD, generates the paper, the dollars, the euro, sterling and countless other currencies which feed the machine – the people.If the profits for the cartels are vast, so also are the quantities that they pump into the market. A company that if it dipped into its petty cash could in the same year buy Coca-Cola. In his youth he had been a violinist of professional standard. Life under Israeli occupation was never easy for him, but his refusal to compromise his beliefs as a healer, a researcher, or a Palestinian provided an example admired by all.In 1947 he married Betty Dagher from Lebanon, who is presently director of the Princess Basma Centre for Disabled Children in Jerusalem.Amin Majaj, physician: born Ramallah, Palestine 21 March 1921; married 1947 Betty Dagher (one son, three daughters); died Jerusalem 2 January 1999.. IMAGINE A multi-national company so big and powerful that its annual turnover is equal in size to China’s gross national product, making that company 11th in the world rankings ahead of the Netherlands, Australia, Russia and India.

Among his many other responsibilities he took over direction of Musa Alami’s Arab Development Society in Jericho, which took boys out of Palestinian refugee camps to teach them agricultural and other skills.Amin Majaj was a delightful man, making little of his many achievements in medicine and politics, humorous and the best of company. He was paediatrician at the Makased Islamic Hospital in Jerusalem from 1967 to 1982 (director from 1977), as well as on the board of hospitals in Gaza and Nablus.He was on the Jerusalem municipal council from 1950 and at the time of his death was acting mayor of East Jerusalem. The remedy, a diet rich in animal proteins and vitamin B12 injections, was easier to recommend than to implement.His researches continued until the children’s wards in the Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem, where Majaj worked as head of the paediatrics department from 1950 to 1991, received a direct hit when the Israelis invaded the West Bank during the 1967 war.Majaj published the results of his researches in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 1966, in the Gazette of the Egyptian Paediatric Association of 1960 and in British and German medical journals. There were now half a million refugees from Palestine in Jordanian camps, kept alive by Unwra rations.

Many children were dying from gastro-enteritis and deficiency diseases.Majaj realised that malnutrition among mothers was making breast-feeding ineffective and that lack of animal protein in the rations was the cause of iron deficiency anaemia, and protein deficiency resulting in diseases such as kwashiorkor. Born in Ramallah in 1921 to a well known Christian family that belonged to the Anglican Episcopalian Church, Majaj was educated at St George’s High School in Jerusalem (part of the Anglican bishopric), going on to the American University of Beirut in 1945 and to London University, where he studied medicine, specialising in child health.
Back in Jordan, Majaj was confronted by a new and challenging situation. AMIN MAJAJ was a brilliant physician and a devoted public servant who enjoyed a wide circle of friends in Britain as well as in the Arab world. In the late Forties and Fiftiese he made detailed researches into malnutrition and its attendant diseases among children in the Palestinian refugee camps, and devised treatments for them. Garden design became one of his major hobbies and with his wife, the flower painter Patricia Newton, he created an enchanting garden with roses, loggias and grottos, waterfalls and fountains interspersed with ornaments and sculpture.Arnold Machin, sculptor: born Trent Vale, Staffordshire 30 September 1911; ARA 1947, RA 1956; Master of Sculpture, Royal Academy School 1958- 67; OBE 1965; married 1949 Patricia Newton (one son); died 9 March 1999.. In 1968 he modelled a set of four allegorical hard-paste porcelain figures of the Four Seasons for Worcester.Arnold Machin was a quiet man with strong beliefs.

He made local headline news in 1956 when he chained himself to a gas lamp in Stoke, which was destined to be replaced by a concrete electric post, declaring that this stand was part of a growing campaign against the spread of “Subtopia” (modernism) being led against Sir Hugh Casson. He was also prominent among the Academicians who protested against the Sensation exhibition in 1997, which included a portrait of the murderer Myra Hindley made with children’s handprints.Almost 20 years ago I interviewed him in his Staffordshire garden. Throughout this time Machin continued to work with ceramics on a freelance basis, undertaking several commissions which included portraits of the Royal Family for Wedgwood, and for Royal Worcester. He taught at the Stoke-on-Trent schools of art in the 1940s, where he had been a pupil of the modeller Eric Owen before moving to Derby, and from 1951 to 1958 at the Royal College of Art.